Letter: Motion of no confidence in Barrington

Posted 9/12/22

To the editor:

When about 50 or more teachers show up to a school committee meeting as they did on Sept. 8, wearing red in solidarity because they are fed up with the overwhelming disregard for …

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Letter: Motion of no confidence in Barrington

Posted

To the editor:

When about 50 or more teachers show up to a school committee meeting as they did on Sept. 8, wearing red in solidarity because they are fed up with the overwhelming disregard for our teacher’s and student’s well being, you know we have a big issue.  

It is an embarrassment to see so many negative headlines about our amazing town and the failures of the Barrington School Committee and BPS Administration. We need to stop this now before we lose more teachers and further harm our children.

Primrose Hill Elementary School is deliberately being overcrowded by the administration. Despite an already stretched thin facility, administration has continually added Pre-K students at the expense of required programming for K-3 students. Primrose students lost their art and music classrooms, as well as their cafeteria last year. This year, a third grade class has been displaced to the cafeteria.

The Primrose children have not had lunch in their cafeteria since March of 2020 and continue to eat lunch in their classrooms this school year. Other than recess and gym (weather permitting), and library, our 5-9-year-olds are confined to their classroom all day. The staff does their best and have been creative, but let's be honest… this situation is stressful for the students, teachers and staff. The children, teachers and staff are still trying to recover from the pandemic and here’s administration layering on another issue for the parents of these kids who have not had school normalcy for the past two and half years.

The root cause of this issue is because the BPS administration has been taking classroom space to accommodate Pre-K classrooms that are NOT REQUIRED. Residents have been told by administration that universal pre-K is or will be a requirement. This is simply not true. The universal Pre-K bill has not been passed yet. The district is required to provide early intervention, but this does not have to be within the schools; it can be outsourced like many other school districts within Rhode Island. Instead of being proactive and planning for universal Pre-K, our district is being reactive and executing despite a lack of physical classroom space.

As tax-paying residents of Barrington and parents of a Primrose third-grader, we demand a strategic plan to alleviate this unnecessary burden on the Primrose community and staff. We would like to pose these two questions: Is the Barrington pre-k a violation of due process as there was no vote to increase capacity within our schools? Is the fact that the pre-k tuition going to the town, not the schools, a misappropriation of tax dollars?

We are officially putting on record a motion of no confidence in the Barrington School Committee the BPS Director of Administration & Finance as well as the BPS Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent.

Erika and Tim Twohig

Barrington

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A lifelong Portsmouth resident, Jim graduated from Portsmouth High School in 1982 and earned a journalism degree from the University of Rhode Island in 1986. He's worked two different stints at East Bay Newspapers, for a total of 18 years with the company so far. When not running all over town bringing you the news from Portsmouth, Jim listens to lots and lots and lots of music, watches obscure silent films from the '20s and usually has three books going at once. He also loves to cook crazy New Orleans dishes for his wife of 25 years, Michelle, and their two sons, Jake and Max.